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After many years dreaming of being a scientist, it turns out that now I actually am a scientist. It's exactly as I expected, and also entirely unexpected. Sometimes it is wonderful, and sometimes it is not. In that way it is just like everything else in life, but in many other ways it is completely different. The purpose of this blog is to illuminate this irritating repetition of "It is, but it is not". Except when it is something else altogether.

Some real-life details. I am from New Zealand. I studied physics there (at Waikato and then Canterbury), and also in the United States. After my PhD I was a researcher in the US, Germany, Ireland, and Austria. I moved to Cardiff in 2010 as an Ernest Rutherford Fellow. (Ernest Rutherford was also from New Zealand, but I hope that is not why they gave me the fellowship.) I am now a Professor at Cardiff, where I study what happens when two black holes collide and fall inside each other. Besides the obvious, which is that they become just one black hole, only bigger.